


Tonight Will Go On Forever

by winged



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, College, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Multi, OT5, Poly Because TRC, Polyamory, chosen family, shitty song lyric titles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:48:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4584864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winged/pseuds/winged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The future spills out ahead unknowable.</i><br/>The summer is ending, and having found each other, no one wants to let go yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tonight Will Go On Forever

“You know, after this, we have to be normal,” Blue says, languid in the heat of an Indian summer. Her hair’s getting long, not by any real standards but long enough that it will all be put into one ponytail and stay there without aid, which means it needs cutting. Her hands are forever in it, letting it free and binding it again. She plucks a dandelion from the field where they’re lying in a half tangle. Too warm to move, and unmotivated to separate themselves to cool off. “Normal adults.”

When she looks back, it’s that statement, she thinks, that made the fates laugh and laugh.

 _Ronan_ laughs, anyway, more of a snort, from where he lies on his side, head propped on one hand indolently. “Adults,” he echoes, like it’s funny, and it is, a little. Gansey raises an eyebrow from where he’s staring thoughtfully into the sky, hands pressed against the earth, and he might be ageless, he might have always existed in some form or another. Noah’s off somewhere, wherever it is that ghosts go when they get bored, but he’s like the opposite, babyfaced and old, new and cautious, impetuous and also dead.

How many lives have they lived and died, created and destroyed between them by now?

Ronan’s folded a piece of grass into a whistle and he puts his fingers to his lips, blowing a shriek over whatever it is Gansey’s thinking. Gansey startles like a bird, and gives him a look; Adam, head resting against Ronan’s hip, swipes at his hand without malice.

“I’m sorry,” Blue corrects herself, rolling her eyes at him, “all of us except _Ronan_.”

“You want to pretend to be something you’re not, you go ahead,” Ronan says. “I’m happy being a freak.” His tattoo has wound itself into something like filigree under a black flock. She counts the birdshaped shadows: One, two, three, four curving down his neck to his shoulder.

“We don’t get to do that forever.” Adam sits up restlessly. Above them the aspens are teasing at golden despite the heat. He squints at the horizon line and looks back, eyes flicking to Blue and back to Ronan, away again. “Even if we wanted to. Things keep moving.”

“ _You_ keep moving,” Blue says, and her tone’s a little rebuking but it’s not unkind. She doesn’t have the prestige or the AP tests granted like a blessing by Aglionby onto applications for school, but if she did -- 

Blue understands, as well or more than any of them, that belonging, that loving, that being important to someone doesn’t settle the need to be something more. For her, to have a reach that exceeds her grasp. Her love for all her boys is different: the way she loves Gansey is fierce and without reason or better judgement; Ronan is sudden and unexpected and a challenge, always, that she feels inclined to win. Her love for Adam is familiar and deepset, battle-scarred, treaty-bound. 

She’s the one, after all, who sat with him at Fox Way, tarot cards replaced by thick pamphlets and scholarship offers all glossy possibility spread across a table. While Ronan found things for himself, and them both, to do at the Barns (she doesn’t ask, nor does she need to); Gansey’s quest turned desperately into who he actually is now and what it is he wants (maybe he won’t go to Yale after all -- maybe he’ll travel, climb mountains -- or, Henrietta should have a real history museum, maybe he can donate his trust fund and get it started -- if he travels, will Blue come with him? He’ll pay, oh don’t look like that Jane) and Noah sullenly clung to Monmouth -- Adam and she were the ones contemplating whether he could actually stand his graduating class enough to survive more versions of them at Georgetown or how very badly Google Maps’ estimated drive time to Virginia Tech underestimated the will of Ronan Lynch.

But it’s still not something she can quite wrap her mind around. 

“If you don’t,” Adam says, “Life does it for you.”

He’s not wrong.

“Adam,” Gansey says , and his voice has studiously taken on that tone, the one that’s speaking to his lieutenants. “All of you -- I want to say --” 

Ronan says, “Shut _up_ , Dick,” and sits up to kiss him. It’s intent and a little unsexual, grounding, and Gansey does shut up: she can almost see the pretense strip off him, in the particular way it only does with Ronan. She feels Adam go still beside her. When she turns to smile at him, there’s something a little too far off to the way his eyes are fixed on them. Removed, carefully.

You don’t hand Adam Parrish things, though. Blue sits up, nudging her way between Gansey and Ronan. “Hey, get your own,” she teases affectionately, pushing Ronan back and leaning herself into Gansey. 

Ronan gives her a Cheshire grin, but his eyes flicker over, just a little, sitting back as she presses her fingertips to his chest. 

Adam sits forward all at once, turns Ronan with a hand on the back of his neck. Ronan hums something like approval, pulled into Adam and a more possessive kiss, hands fumbling to the back pockets of his jeans to hold onto him. She’s close enough that she can feel them warm next to her. 

It feels as impossible now to imagine them all not together as it would if she’d been told three years ago that this would be her life. But the weeks keep moving anyway.

Gansey takes a long breath in, and she catches his eyes and the hundred things going on in them. There’s a place her head fits exactly against the curve of his shoulder, where she can feel his heart beating against all odds. Right now she presses her face to it, breathes in the smell of Henrietta clay and grass and the leather of the Pig and too much sun and always always mint and paper. 

“Jane,” he says, muffled against her hair, and she tips her face up. 

He bends to her like a tree toward water. It’s still new, kissing Gansey, surprising and breathtaking, like a place she’s walked past forever and never had the opportunity to explore. Even since Glendower, since everything between them. It still feels like cheating, a little, like something she’s not allowed. 

She kisses the anxiousness from his lips, presses her love back into them. Gansey, she’s found, is nothing other than himself when it comes to kisses or any other affection. Sometimes proprietous, sometimes wild, but always thorough. A quick learner and uncannily lucky. 

His kiss back now is soft, mild, all gentleman, but it ends up unraveling completely into something less controlled, more wanting, and she whimpers softly against it. Behind her she can hear Ronan laugh, soft, saying something to Adam lower than she can hear or cares to pay attention to. 

Gansey pulls back to catch his breath and looks over her shoulder for a moment before meeting her eyes. His fingers trace her back. “We could find a place to live together,” he says, eyes fixed on hers, “all of us. I could find one --” Blue wants so badly to give in to believing that. It’d be so easy. 

Instead Blue presses another kiss to his lips and turns in his arms, leans to run a hand up along the back of Adam’s neck, push fingers into his hair. Adam blinks where he’s sitting, tipping his head back with a sigh, and she drags her nails a little. Ronan smirks at it and leans to kiss his exposed neck, eyes flickering up; she can see his whole body kind of fight a tremble, hand going clenched on Ronan’s shoulder, teeth scraping over his own lip. 

Watching Adam give in to feeling good is always a little intoxicating, even if she isn’t involved in it at all. It’s like the way that she feels when she’s able to fluster Gansey, dishevel; watch the carefully prepared outsides peel away to something more.

They’d found this - thing - by accident, the five of them, the way they’d all found each other. Before they found Glendower. Chaos or destiny, dreamed up against all sense or inevitability. Ronan saying, reproach failing to hide loyalty, _we’re still yours, you know_ and Gansey’s blink of startled pleasure. Noah, like always, ahead of everyone to the conclusion and wearing a knowing grin. Doors casually left open. Kisses shared and jealousy soothed. Notes forgotten half-finished. 

That night, when they’d all thought Gansey was really dead, she’s glad there wasn’t any awkwardness about who to hold or be held by. 

“What are you doing,” Adam says, in a sigh, and she can’t tell if she’s talking to him or to Ronan, who has moved to slide his hands up under Adam's shirt, still biting and kissing.

“ _You_ , I think,” Ronan says, and his grin is mischievous, leaning up into him, but his eyes take in Adam like he’s going to disappear if he looks away too long, and the way he touches Adam always seems to Blue to be a little reverent, even in its intensity.  
Adam laughs and swears under his breath at the same time, and his eyes pass through confused to distracted, shrugging off his shirt in one move, pressing himself into Ronan’s hands. He turns to Blue and Gansey, intent, and Blue’s only a little surprised when Gansey’s the one who reaches for him first. 

 

They’re all different in their physicality, all so utterly themselves: fumbling, forging, strange and wonderful. Ronan, reckless and laughing and all assurance in front of need; Adam a little tentative and then intent, self-sacrificing until he’s forced from it; Gansey a cartographer, keeping notes in his head about weak spots and reactions, a little in love with everybody and more interested in their secrets than his own. 

Blue thinks her own strength is in challenge. 

Today’s a little different though. It’s not about pushing what they imagine to reality, it’s not just about being comfortable when two of them split off, or easy curling up together. It’s a little urgent, a little declarative. _We still need you_ , she says in kisses Adam earned when he wasn’t asking, and it’s echoed in Gansey’s hands, Ronan’s teeth, Noah brighter as he finds them. _We will all always need each other._

The stars are coming out when Blue stirs from where they’ve all half fallen asleep. Adam’s in a rare state of sprawl, dozing, one arm thrown over Blue’s hips and brushing Gansey’s leaner frame. Ronan’s not there and she looks around, disoriented. 

Noah’s curled up alongside them and she gives him a sleepy nuzzle-kiss. “Did you see where Ronan went?” 

“You only like me for my information,” he says and rests his head on her shoulder. “He got up a while ago and went walking.” 

“We should go home,” she says, stretching, and frowning with a tug at her shirt, trapped under Gansey. She steals his instead, not something she would call a polo shirt but with a little embroidered rider to prove her inexperienced in these things. “I bet we’re all bitten up.”

“I’m not. Don’t go yet?”

She presses her face against his hair. This close to her he’s cold, but solid. “I’ll be right back. Get these two lazies.” 

 

“You better have gotten food if you were going to leave us, asshole,” she informs Ronan when she spots him. “I could eat an entire grocery store.”

“Catch, maggot.” 

Ronan throws a plastic bag at her from next to where he's sitting in the shadow of the Pig, the aftermath of a solo venture down to the last gas station and back. She digs around and hums her approval over Swedish fish.

This is familiar: the two of them snacking while the others drift. His wandering feels weightier right now though, and she's grateful for the relative normalcy of chewing up gummy fish as she sits down next to him.

Blue knows not to ask Ronan if he's okay even if he doesn't seem okay: she also knows not to alert Gansey to the fact that he's asleep in a field full of summer flowers. There's no reason to distress people by pointing out they're being distressing.

Instead she offers him a fish.

"Oh, of course I get the green one," he says, and she says, 

"Luck of the Irish."

"I woke up with this," Ronan tells her, out of nowhere, and holds it out to her.

She looks at it, heavy and silver and obvious in its origin.

"It's a monkey wrench," he supplies, and she says, "I know what it is," in a tone that indicates he should be deeply ashamed for assuming otherwise. Blue takes it, tosses it in her hand. It has surprising heft for something out of a dream, but then this is Ronan.

"So you dream about Adam's tools a lot?" She grins at him mischievously, and Ronan snaps, 

"Fuck you, gimme that back." 

"Hey." She looks up at him, softer. "I'm -"

Ronan interrupts her, taking the dream wrench. "I'm just -- fucked, you know?" He swings the wrench aggressively at nothing, shooting a glance back the way they'd come. He looks down at it in his hand, runs a thumb up over the ridges of the jaws of it.

"Yeah," she says and, abruptly unhungry, makes her fish swim in front of her, wrapping an arm around her knees. She ponders the fish very seriously. "It's only a semester and then holidays," she offers.

"Fuck that," Ronan says. "Anyway, that's not what I mean. Mostly," he amends.

Blue leans against him, carefully, waiting for the explosion and settling more closely against his side when it doesn’t come. Instead he shifts to let her closer, and she reaches to spin the screw of the wrench in his hand.

“You’re in this,” she says. “I know. We all are. We’ve _been_. It’s scary.” Scary doesn’t seem like the right word. Scary is a movie; this is everything. Throwing your whole heart against a hard wind hoping the people you trust most are on the other side. 

Safe as life.

Blue doesn't have a map for the future. Not one she cares to look at. That doesn't mean she isn't intimidated by it being there.

Ronan chews on his wristband. "I just don't know if everyone else is all in, sometimes." 

“You’re stupid,” Blue assesses and looks back up at him. "Eat a Swedish fish and accept how much that boy loves you.” 

Ronan barks a laugh, surprised and scornful and maybe a little gratified. “Maybe.” He takes a fish. He takes the bag. “It's not just Parrish."

Blue tips her head back and watches lightning bugs look desperately for love. "I know." The future spills out ahead unknowable, but above her the sky is a big safe globe, and she can pick out the figures. Sirius. Orion. Taurus. Stars she can count on. Half of them could be gone for thousands of years now. Maybe there are more that she can’t see yet. But she recognizes this sky. 

Right now, this evening stretches out in every direction. 

"Sometimes the things you're sure of are the things you're least sure of. You know?” 

"Intimately."

“It’d be really nice if things could just stay like this,” she admits. “Maybe not better. But nice.” 

They sit in silence, contemplating the dust and the grass and the stars. “Yeah, I like you too, maggot,” Ronan says after a minute, smirking. “Catch.” He tosses a fish in the air above them both. She grins, sentiment chased away, and leans her head back to catch the candy in her mouth. 

There’s a peal of laughter from down the road that can only be Noah’s, and they look up. Blue leans up to see, and Ronan gets to his feet with the kind of lazy stretch of limbs that’s more intentional than it looks. Adam’s saying, “Just beautiful,” and she can hear Gansey grousing, “All right? Are we done here?” 

“No, no, you have to wait. Adam, stop him--”

“About time,” Ronan calls back toward them, falling into his usual armor of guarded affection easily. “Do I want to know what heinous acts you three were up to without us?” 

“Could ask you that,” Adam calls back, and Noah yells over him, “We made Gansey wear Blue’s shirt!” 

Ronan regards her, in Gansey’s, and says, “Fair play,” with an arch of his eyebrow. 

She bursts into laughter, putting her face in her hands for a second. “Real mature, you guys.”

“Not my fault I’m not capable of aging.”

“This is really your fault,” Gansey says to her as he gets to them, and Blue represses a giggle at him with about three inches of torso bare under the hem of her t-shirt. 

“Mm-mm. Your fault for sleeping on it. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She runs her fingers up along the skin exposed by a cut off scoop neck. “This is a great look.” She can’t look at him and keep the straight face she’s attempting. “But I think you’re stretching the shoulders out so, switch.” 

 

Ronan usually gets shotgun by tradition and height, but he takes a spot in the back without asking, and this means an entirely different and briefer squabble over music. Blue falls asleep on the way home and wakes up to mellow guitars. In the back, Ronan has fallen asleep with his knees tucked up; Adam is curled against his shoulder. Noah’s watching out the backseat driver’s side window, quietly commenting on things to Gansey, and he smiles brightly when he notices she’s awake. 

The road stretches out ahead. She feels a surge of rightness flood her, warm and happy to the tips of her fingers.

Gansey reaches for her hand and brings it to his lips: it still feels defiant. “We’ll be home soon,” he tells her, and she just smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Big, big thank yous to Joy for her awesome betaing skills. She is probably the reason I finished this and definitely the reason there aren't weird unfinished sentences.
> 
> The prompt I was initially encouraged to write was "Blue and the boys raising a baby." That...did not happen. Instead this did, because the universe wanted more feelings about Adam Parrish. That's okay. I can do that, universe.
> 
> There are little clues to it if you squint and look sideways! Maybe they're really, really in-advance foreshadowing. Because let's face it, this is a thing.


End file.
